Julian Woody was dead and buried before he was even supposed to have been born.
Sixteen days after the baby boy's premature birth, he died of blunt force trauma and multiple skull fractures -- an important medical finding from the autopsy, a Baltimore County prosecutor told a judge yesterday because infants' heads are "soft and pliable" for easier passage through the birth canal during labor.
The image of the boy in the hospital, "his head swollen to the size of a cantaloupe, is burned into my memory," the child's mother, Alisia Woody, said yesterday at the sentencing hearing for her former boyfriend.
That man, 21-year-old Kenneth G. Ryan, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his son last year. He pleaded guilty last month to second-degree murder and child abuse, admitting that he inflicted the injuries that caused the infant's death but offering no explanation as to what happened.
That lingering question hung over the emotional hearing yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court.
"We don't know what happened. We don't know why," prosecutor Leo Ryan Jr. told the judge. "We do know the result."
Defense attorney Jerri Peyton-Braden told the judge that her client -- who has long struggled with drug and alcohol addictions -- was high the night of Feb. 26, 2007, when police were called to the Dundalk home of the baby's grandmother and mother for a report of child abuse.
Kenneth Ryan had taken Xanax, a prescription medication used to treat anxiety disorders, and had inhaled the spray of Dust-Off, a household product that uses a burst of gas to clean computer keyboards and other electronics, the defense attorney said.
"To this day, I don't think that even Ken Ryan knows what happened," she said.
Judge Robert N. Dugan interrupted the lawyer.
"I think the answer is that someone who abuses drugs loses his good judgment," he said. "Of course, I also believe that one voluntarily decides to abuse drugs."
The defendant's parents detailed in court his substance abuse problems, explaining how a child who was so bright that a school evaluator once suggested that he go to first grade at age four later ended up in drug rehabilitation programs and then criminal court.
In middle school, Ellen Ryan said, her son made friends who "helped Kenny go down a road that he should not have gone down." He started to miss curfews, his grades suffered, he lost weight. Uncertain whether they were overreacting, Ellen and Philip Ryan sent their son to a drug treatment center.
